


The Many-Fauceted Beryl

by RandomItemDrop (thedurvin), thedurvin



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Eye of Argon - Jim Theis, Random Item Drop
Genre: Gen, MacGuffins, Parody, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:54:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27790075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedurvin/pseuds/RandomItemDrop, https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedurvin/pseuds/thedurvin
Summary: Four NPCs and aspiring adventurers lend their services to Dr. Berreth Stew, whose experiments with a mysterious heart-shaped gem into the origins of anthropomorphic animal life may have spiraled out of control.
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

Taru is one of the most distant, isolated crags, one of the few decent-sized hunks of rock that the various regional governments of Ridare have yet to claim. It is a broad, lumpy region of dry grass and weedy sprawl-rooted trees that ensure that if there are any useful resources worth harvesting under the surface, it’s easier to get them elsewhere. There are not many places across the Realms less worth the trip. So, of course, there we were…Zygmund Collection & Disposal Services: We Come To You™. Hobb had finally learned to drive, even if the city didn’t issue official licenses to flesh-constructs, so they were getting some practice in where there wasn’t much for our Crabero to run into. Gloo was in the passenger-seat wearing her containment-suit so she didn’t digest the upholstery with her gelatinous skin, using her Oozekin tendrils to clean under the dashboard. Abby and I were in the backseat; I was scrunched behind the seat to keep the wind out of my fur and practicing Bardic cantrips on my keytar while she tried to throw me off my beat by summoning chattering skulls from the Dark World and lifting up her eye-patch to wink at me with her bad eye. I don’t know if she was trying to be helpful by simulating a real battle or if she was just being annoying; she might not have known either.  
There was a freeway that cut across Taru on its way somewhere worth going, and rather than taking the exit-ramp onto the one access road maintained by the Academy, Hobb had sent the Crabero scuttling cross-country across the open plains, I assume on purpose. We were headed for an isolated research facility owned by Abby’s mentor and program advisor at the Academy, Dr. Quincunx, department head of Evil Studies. A member of his faculty was doing some lab work out here and had made some kind of mess that needed cleaning up; Dr. Stew was refusing to give Dr. Quincunx any details about what was wrong but maintained that he and his nephew, a professional monster-hunter, had things under control. Dr. Quincunx wasn’t convinced and just happened to have a talented grad student with no respect for the rules and part-ownership of an under-the-table Nonprofessional Partnered Contributor (NPC) adventurer services company with some friends, so he hired us to head out to Taru and assist Dr. Stew as needed. (I am legally obligated to say we are not licensed Idolclastors, nor are we unlicensed monster hunters, as defined by Falcopolis Code 5-12:03b, or quaestors, FC 6-02:5a. As allowed by the original articles establishing the Idolclastors and their governing bodies, Nonprofessional Partnered Contributors may be hired as adjunct adventurers and party aids as needed. Permits are available for viewing upon request from ZCDS Humanoid Resources.)  
(I am ZCDS Humanoid Resources. The whole company is just us four, so we all have a lot of jobs, and also a couple of fake names. Sometimes we disguise our voices to sound like there are more of us when people call. HR was an Orque named Zhuustyn Kuulvair; I’m pretty sure I was doing the accent right.)  
Glancing around the vast emptiness of Taru, it wasn’t hard to spot Dr. Stew’s whitewashed lab looking like a cinderblock in a haystack. To make things even easier, the landscape was greener around the building—healthy grass, wildflowers, some cute little shrubs, the only trees for miles you might voluntarily eat fruit off.  
“That’s probably a good sign, right? Live plants?” Gloo asked. “Kinda the opposite of what I was expecting when we were hired to clean up a mess at an evil scientist’s secret research facility.”  
“As long as the trees aren’t carnivorous, trying to use the fruit as bait,” I said. “You ever hear about that monster they used to have sometimes where you’d see what looked like a rabbit on a tree-stump but actually it was a lure and really the stump was a monster that would grab people with its root-tentacles?”  
“Was the rabbit real?” Hobb asked.  
“I dunno, the things have gotten pretty rare,” I said. “I don’t know if it was part of the head or an actual dead rabbit it was holding up or if it had some kind of symbiotic relationship with a regular rabbit. It’s super silly, anyway.”  
“Til you get your foot ate off by a fucking tree stump,” Abby said. “Nah, I’m getting a magic vibe off the herbiage; you know how much us Elves groove on that shit, all attuned to nature or whatever.”  
“Maybe Dr. Stew has been calling out the Weather Bureau?”  
“Nah. Those dudes use arcane magic, this is totally some divine shit. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Dr. Stew had imported some Valley-Dryads or something.”  
“How do you know he hasn’t?” I asked.  
“Not his style. He’s one of those scientist-dudes that thinks he’s too good for magic, gotta understand what he’s doing before he does it.”  
“You’re studying to be an evil wizard, aren’t you?” Hobb asked. “Do you not understand magic?”  
“Sure I do. I understand that it’s fucking magic, dude. What else can you say about it? It’s like asking why Fairy-Drink is good as shit. It tastes good because it’s good-tasting.”  
“Do we know what kind of research the guy is doing out here?” Gloo asked.  
“He won’t tell Doc Q what he’s up to out here, so it’s probably something really stupid,” Abby said. “My money’s on zombie army. Anybody? Twenty Falcoins says zombie army.”  
“I don’t have twenty Falcoins, but I will also say zombie army,” Hobb said. “But not, like, regular zombies. I’m gonna say…Goblin zombies.”  
“Gazomblies! Fuck yeah, dude,” Abby said. “Dwyn? Gloo?”  
“I also don’t have money to be gambling with,” I said. “Ugh. I still have six payments left on this keytar, and the Crabero and the armor are hand-me-downs from before Dad retired from monster-hunting. Not everybody’s got Elf money.”  
“Hey, fuck you, cat-girl,” Abby protested. “Your ass forgets I was cast from my fucking Clan-Halls and banished from the Elven Enclaves.”  
“For practicing shadow-magic?” Gloo asked.  
“Oh, yeah, shadow-magic, stole a couple cars, a little light arson, whatever,” Abby smirked, leaning back. She pulled the hood on her sweatshirt over her face so all that shone out was her one good eye, luminous pink. “Typical weekend. You guys wanna hang out Saturday? I wanna take the train out to the Ruins of Micmorc and see if they still let me in the Dark Elf clubs.”  
“Guys? We’re here,” Hobb said. In the middle of a garden of flowering bushes, the Crabero scuttled to a stop outside the door and folded its legs so we could get out. The building was an ugly two-story rectangle, surrounded by a razor-wire security fence to enclose the building and a small parking area. A security camera was keeping a close watch on us, so I waved.  
“Good afternoon, Dr. Stew, we’re here from Zygmund Collection & Disposal,” I said to the camera, hoping there was a microphone as well. “My name is Dwyn Purrlington. Your boss Dr. Quincunx at the Academy or somebody should have told you were coming today?”  
“They told me, and I told them it was unnecessary,” a voice said from a speaker beside the camera. “As you’re here, I suppose I should invite you in, but please, don’t let me hold you from more pressing jobs. The situation here is entirely under control.” I checked my notes and remembered that Dr. Quincunx had mentioned that Dr. Stew would probably not cooperate, but we were supposed to insist. “Please don’t touch any of the plants, by the way. Or anything else you find out there. Unless Mr. Zygmund offers his employees highly-inclusive health insurance.” I looked over my shoulder in time to hear a fresh-picked melon hit the ground and see Hobb trying to look nonchalant. Its brown rind cracked to reveal red flesh inside, almost bloody-looking.  
“Don’t worry, Dr. Soup, we keep this shit on the down-low,” Abby told him. “Dr. Quincunx knows whatever you’re doing out here is sketchy as hell, which is why he got us instead of hiring the legal kind of monster-hunters—” I elbowed her in the ribs.  
“As long as you act with discretion, touch nothing, and tell no one of what you see, a few extra sets of hands would not be remiss,” the speaker said. “Is this your whole team? A Catfolk bard, an Elven spell-caster, and…”  
“And two Super Falcozoids. Gloo is our sanitation engineer and Hobb is technically only licensed as a building inspector, but if they get up to other things, we’ll be relying on your discretion just like you’re relying on ours,” I told him. “Falcozoids are a proprietary subtype of flesh-constructs created by the city—”  
“I know, I consulted with FalCorp on their development,” Dr. Stew said. “I single-handedly brought flesh-constructs out of old-fashioned grave-robbing and into the scientific age; for one thing I was the one to convince Dr. Requiem and Dr. Eh-X to load synthetic psyches via mnemocassettes instead of Dr. von Kabinett’s outdated hypno-implantation. My theoretical work formed the spine from which the Lord-Falconer commissioned a team to create his army of clones. And since these two are joking and cavorting with Human-like intelligence instead of standing at attention awaiting orders, I will assume these are some of those discarded experimental augmented editions from the second wave after that fool Dr. Pegasus took over the project. The one in the containment suit, I assume, is an Ooze crossbreed—that will be your sanitation engineer—but what about her friend? The distinctive blue-green flesh and hairless pate betray precious little. Still has their mnemocassette drive installed as well.”  
“Hobb’s special abilities we try to keep secret before jobs, if you don’t mind, Dr. Stew,” I asked. “May we come in? Or would you rather come out here? Sounds like you’d rather we didn’t wander the grounds unsupervised.”  
“No, don’t!” he snapped, loud enough the speaker feedbacked. “Ahem. No, thank you. If you’ll promise not to touch anything or speak to anyone about what you see, I’ll buzz you in. And that includes Dr. Quincunx—you have your tasks assigned by him, and if you are to help me and obtain my signature on the completed work order, you will tell him nothing beyond the fact that your tasks were completed.” He paused. “In fact, I would be happy to sign off on your work order right now and have you all on your way.”  
“Sorry, Doc, you’re stuck with us,” Abby said. “ZCDS isn’t the kind of company you join if you’re just earning a paycheck. You just trying to earn some gold, go get a job at McFungusFlayer or something. All four of us are here because we like seeing weird shit and occasionally beating the shit out of said weird shit when the need arises.”  
“Well, well,” the speaker muttered as the door mechanically opened from within. “How fortunate for Mr. Zygmund and his professional reputation.”  
“Mrs. Zygmund,” Gloo corrected.  
(There is no Zygmund, Mr., Mrs., Mx., or otherwise; we just like having a fake boss to forward complaints to. I picked the name out of the phonebook so we could be ‘the last word in NPCs’, but then Abby pointed out nobody actually says that anymore.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ITEMS & ENCOUNTERS:   
> • The Crabero: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/175220602706/  
> • Gloo the Oozekin Falcozoid is original but for visualization’s sake maybe reference the Jelly-Like Boy With Glistening Skin: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/183161537351/   
> • Fairy Drink: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/622998551630364672/   
> • Meat Melon: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/630283609407963136/   
> • Mnemocassettes: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/185492822724/


	2. Chapter 2

The door opened itself to reveal Dr. Stew himself, right beside the door at the security console. He was a slender man with the classic scientist look—aviator glasses, skinny suspenders, lab coat, tie. He was a Human and seemed to be using black pomade to cover up white hair (or maybe blonde, Humans all look alike to me.) Over his shoulders we could see the interior of the lab was whitewashed cinderblock, just as it was on the outside, but now instead of being wreathed with unusually healthy plant-life, it was lit with fluorescent bulbs and junked up with steel conduits everywhere. Scattered throughout the clutter were containers of glowing red and pink liquid—test tubes, beakers, barrels, two-liter soda bottles. “Hello, Dr. Stew,” I said, shaking his hand. “Sorry, can I get something out of the way first? Is your nephew here? I know you told Dr. Quincunx you and he were taking care of whatever the issue was. Gareth Stew is a pretty famous Idolclastor, and I would love to meet him.”  
“No, I sent Gareth back into the city when Dr. Quincunx informed me it was his plan to hire you whether I liked it or not,” Dr. Stew said. “My nephew was helpful with this sensitive issue, but it was becoming clear that the situation out here is not something I’m interested in having licensed Idolclastors around with all their paperwork. Gareth is a good boy, but he chafes under the rules and I’d hate to see him receive professional demerits just for helping out an old man with a piffling problem like—ahem.” He scanned the horizon. “Why don’t you all come inside? We can discuss things more comfortably, and I can show you where the problem started.” He pressed a lever to close and seal the doors behind us. Without waiting to make sure we were following, he began striding his long legs down the dingy white corridors. “I may as well tell you now that the kind of research I’m doing here is completely illegal. The Falcopolis civic authorities feel like we have enough problems with outside invaders and secret demon-worshiping cults without people like myself researching the origins of life and the mechanics of creating it. Never mind the fact that two of your party members wouldn’t exist without my work, and you, Miss Purrlington—your father is Big Billy Purrlington, who runs those distasteful ads for his homunculus factory, isn’t he? Wouldn’t he be interested to harness those same forces to create new and better homunculuses?”  
“Homunculi,” I corrected.  
“Homunculodes. I’m the wizard here,” Abby said.   
“In any case,” Dr. Stew said, “without your father’s fortune from his homunculus business, I daresay you would not be half so well equipped with your open-roofed crab-apparatus and your handheld synthesizer with its programmable spelldrive.”  
“Dr. Stew, the Purrlington Cat Factory is tightly regulated to ensure that all our animated figures are within the bounds of Falcopolis codes, the Crabero is a hand-me-down from back when Big Billy Purrlington was an adventurer himself, and I paid for the keytar with money I earned from my office job,” I sighed. “In fact, the whole reason Dad retired as an Idolclastor was that he was injured during that huge battle when a college of Squid-Popes woke up Erolotus the Teratoforge in the Ophiuchus Ruins to try and create a new race to replace the corrupt and decadent Humanoids of the Falcopolis. Remember how that went?”  
“Rest assured, I am dealing with forces much more wholesome then necromantically resurrecting a biomechanical monster factory,” he said. We must have made our way to the center of the building by now, and were gathered outside a pair of barred double-doors marked with the jagged warning symbol for dangerous magic. “I may be morally dubious, religiously heretical, and unbound from the petty considerations of hand-wringing purists that want to debate ethics and philosophy, but I am not stupid.”   
“Well, as per Falcopolis Code 6-14:7j, we do not discriminate against beings of evil alignment,” I told him.  
“I asked Dr. Quincunx if I could use this old lab out here because I knew there was potential for error, and in my field, the less witnesses the better,” Dr. Stew explained, ignoring me. Well, he did just explain that he was evil, hard to be shocked if he was also rude. “My work, as always, deals with exploring the development of life through scientific means. My current experiments deal with a particular item I discovered in an unused corner of the Academy archives, unarchived, awaiting proper accessioning into the catalog. It will have to wait a bit longer.” He opened the doors, revealing a thick-walled chamber protecting a huge red heart-shaped gem, into which there were a number of tubes and faucets stuck, draining off a thick luminous fluid into a nest of tubes and wires underneath.  
“So by ‘scientific’, you mean you stole a giant mystery gemstone from the Academy basement?” Abby said.  
“Any magic, sufficiently understood, is science,” he half-snarled. “How familiar are you four with the origins of the Animalfolk of Ridare? Catfolk such as yourself, Miss Purrlington. Birdfolk, Satyrs, even Undertoads and Squid-Popes.”  
“A century or so ago, after the planet Ridare was shattered by the dark magic of the Overgegner, the crags first formed out of areas protected by strong magic,” I said. “An ancient Forest-God had protected a crag of wilderness and a bunch of animals, and then used the last of its power to grant us intelligence and thumbs and all. Our ancestors showed up to the Falcopolis as refugees during the Second Falconer’s times.”  
“Very good,” said Dr. Stew. “A gold star for you. Popular theory is that after that god’s powers were used up, it dissipated, but what you see before you may cause that theory to require amendment. While researching the science behind creation-magic, I stumbled upon a certain item in the Academy’s deepest archives dating from around that same time. I don’t know if it was brought by the refugees and surrendered or if someone went back looking for it. It is my belief that what you see here is the beryl-crystal heart of the Creator-God that uplifted the Animalfolk all those years ago.”  
“What is that, a giant ruby?” Abby asked.  
“No, beryl,” Dr. Stew said. “It’s a red relation of emerald.”  
“So it’s a red emerald?” Gloo asked.  
“No, emeralds are green beryls. This is a red beryl,” he replied.  
“It’s shaped like a heart, not a barrel,” Hobb said.  
“In any case,” Dr. Stew sighed, “I have been analyzing the effects the gem and its effluvia have on existing life to try and understand how its energies cause living organisms to adapt and grow into more advanced forms. As you can see, my methodology of drawing out its ichor to analyze and experiment with has caused it to over-produce, and since its effects on biota had only been positive, I thought nothing of distributing the substance in discrete sites across Taru to observe the effects on the biospheres. Now that I’ve seen the error of that, I’m trying to decrease its production, and my nephew and I had been sealing it in whatever materials we could find for later disposal, but we can only do so much on that front.”  
“So we’re here for just a toxic cleanup?” Gloo asked.   
“No, unfortunately. This is much worse,” Dr. Stew said. “I have been harvesting the Heart’s liquid energy via these faucets and experimenting with the resultant ichor with promising results on isolated tissue samples, but it appears there has been…runoff.”  
“Runoff,” I mused.  
“Yes,” he said with a little cough, “runoff.”  
“Runoff from a mysterious gem you found in a secret vault under the Academy which may or may not be the remains of an incredibly powerful dead god, and which you then snuck out of the Academy to a nice little quiet isolated research facility away from the hustle and bustle of academia—oh, and relevant governing bodies and oversight boards—so you could conduct unsupervised experiments in which you poured liquid magic in random spots in the woods to see what happens.”  
“You make it sound so sordid,” Dr. Stew said. I paused for a second.  
“Well, the plants look nice and healthy, so that’s nice,” I said. “But I assume we’re not here to help you with the gardening.”  
“No,” Dr. Stew sighed. “The plants are not the problem.”  
“Animals,” I sighed. “Ugh. I guess even in a place like this there’s bound to be some vermin, at least. Squirrels, songbirds, raccoons.”  
“The plants just look healthier and prettier—the animals didn’t do that too, did they?” Gloo asked. “Chipmunks with extra-chubby cheeks? Duckbunnies wearing little hats and bowties?” Dr. Stew shook his head.  
“At least tell me there’s nothing worse than a few feral dogs or a really grumpy jackalope,” I said. He didn’t answer. “Great. Great. Well, Doctor, what kind of unholy abominations are we looking at? Slavering and thirsting for our flesh, or more on the eldritch end of things trying to devour our souls?”  
“Honestly, more annoying than anything,” he replied. “Rude, I think, is the word. Hoodlums.”  
“So, what, like,” Hobb began, “your horrible slime-mutants are cussing and smoking? Playing their music too loud? Skateboarding in your parking lot?”  
“Worse than that. There was an attack,” Dr. Stew said. “I had ordered a delivery of gloves and boots so Gareth and I could work on cleaning up this mess, but the automated delivery truck was attacked just off that wooded ridge you can see in the distance there. When we saw what had happened, Gareth went to recover the truck, but it had been quite emptied.”  
“So Taru has a bandit problem?” Abby asked. “Bandits trying to corner the black market on safety gear?”  
“My entire monthly supply delivery. Gloves, boots, a pallet of snacks and energy potions I had ordered for Gareth, everything,” he said. “Some equipment and instruments were simply smashed, but most of it was just gone. Fortunately my deliveries come through the Academy and not through general FalCorp retail, or else the incident report would have gone to civic authorities and not my own superiors. I assured Dr. Quincunx that Gareth and I could handle whatever the disturbance was, then we armed ourselves as best we could until the things showed themselves. Gareth even tried going out on his motorbike to hunt them down. It wasn’t until they conducted a raid on the lab here that we discovered what exactly we were dealing with.”  
“They attacked the whole lab?” I asked.  
“Just a quick raid through the service entrance loading dock. Come this way, I can show you the footage in my security office.” He closed the doors to the heart chamber and led us to an office, where a worn-out office chair faced a few CCTV monitors.  
“Ooh, electronics,” Hobb said, taking the chair.  
“Of course. If the Academy is going to trust its security to an automated system, we will have something reliable enough that it will take more than some fool with a Divination-Proof Cloak to get by it.”  
“Uh, I’m just excited because I have one too,” Hobb said, tapping the tape-drive set into their skull. “My internal memory has never really worked right, but I can pop in mnemocassettes to load up with specialized information. We went down to the Tower of Records and got every monster-manual and fiend-folio they had, so I’m going to load the index and see if I can tell what these things are.”  
“Fascinating,” Dr. Stew said, although I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not. He inserted a tape into the viewing-monitor. “Take a look. You see here where something tears its way through the reinforced door, setting off the perimeter alarm. Gareth and I outfitted ourselves as well as we could with his weaponry and armor, but by the time we reached them they had already torn open our Stop-n-Quaff machine and emptied it, then split into two groups: Gareth pursued one group with his swords into our tool-room and engaged them in combat, while I, armed with a firearm, followed a smaller party into our laundry-room, where they were helping themselves to a week’s worth of clean clothes. Unfortunately, I am no combatant, and one of them shortly overpowered me and took my gun.” We watched the writhing little figures for a moment.  
“What the hell kind of mutants are you making out here with that toxic goo, Doc?” Abby smirked.  
“I can barely make out what I’m looking at here,” Hobb said, squinting. “It looks like a bunch of big-headed kids tearing up your place.”  
“Yes, I’m sorry if all this has been leading you to picture the creatures as inhuman monstrosities,” Dr. Stew sighed. “Don’t mistake me, they are grotesque to look at. As you say, the creatures have grown to about the size of Human children or teenagers, walking upright on slender seemingly-boneless limbs—what they looked like during the attack on the supply truck I couldn’t say, but during their raid on the building most of them were wearing the gloves and boots, presumably to give shape to their formless limbs. I am not one to cringe at the abnormal, but it gives me pause even now to picture the thing that jumped me, which seemed to be the leader. Covered in black spines, red eyes glistening between its fleshy eyelids as its fingers wriggled around the hilt of my gun. When its lips parted to speak I could see Human teeth—incisors, canines, molars.”  
“They can talk?” I asked. “What did it say?”  
“I wish I could tell you the exact words it used, but they were largely unfamiliar to me,” he said. “It greeted me in an informal tone and said ‘looks like there’s a new ultimate life-form in town’, then it called me a lame wad? What does that even mean?” Abby stifled a laugh. “In any case, I attempted to protest and it demanded that I speak to its hand, as its face was disinclined to listen, then said its name was ‘Hedgelord’. It then inquired to its compatriots whether or not the spoils of our laundry-cart had yielded any ‘cool threads’. The reply was in the negative, although they still made off with quite a bit of it. The leader then admonished Gareth and I for our stilted fashion sense, called us both ‘nerds’, and announced to its fellow-creatures ‘time to jet, dudes,’ and with that they withdrew. Gareth had fought bravely but there were simply too many of them, and even he only narrowly escaped major injury—we’re fairly sure he wounded a few of them with his broadsword Ettresictus, but they managed to avoid any fatalities. These creatures are multitudinous, variegated, and dangerous.”  
“Speaking of, Hobb,” Abby said, “any idea what we’re looking at?”  
“Yes and no,” Hobb answered. “I’m recognizing the species, but they’ve all been mutated into creepy little dudes.” They rewound the tape and pointed out a couple of individual creatures. “This guy with the drill for the nose is probably a Dirtshark, judging from the ventral cranial armor. There are a couple of Humanoid-faced Tropical Flumphs in the background there, this one trying to eat a handtruck is a really fat marmot, and look at this bird guy tearing open a storage cabinet with its bare hands, which it shouldn’t have.”  
“Look at those beautiful man-arms,” Abby said, nodding with approval at its beefy biceps. “What about this little dude here with the dreds that keeps popping in and out of frame?”  
“My guess is those are tentacles and it’s a Displacer-Beast,” they said. “Professor, this is a really varied bunch of monsters you’ve got there.”  
“What about the one that attacked me?”  
“Porcupine, maybe?” Hobb said. “And I think the big one here in the tutu is an Owlbear. Professor, were there any tutus in your delivery order that they highjacked?”  
“Forget the tutu, there shouldn’t be Owlbears in Taru,” I said. “Ugh. Doctor, you’ve been talking about all these experiments and observations you’ve been working on. Please tell me you haven’t been experimenting on Owlbears.”  
“No, Miss Purrlington. As previously mentioned, I may be evil but I am not stupid,” Dr. Stew said. “If I had known there were Owlbears and Displacer-Beasts and whatever else there might be, do you really think I would have been dumping experimental bio-augmentation fluids into the wilderness? I have certainly never heard of such a thing in Taru, have you?”  
“If I’ve heard anything about Taru, it’s that there’s nothing here worth seeing and nobody comes out here, so I’m not sure what the official wildlife census is,” I said. “I have to say, Doctor, it doesn’t sound like you and Gareth had things under control.” I hoped he couldn’t read the nervousness in my voice—hip lingo and bad attitudes aside, a swarm of feral anthropomorphic mutations was definitely the kind of job professional Idolclastors should be handling. If these things managed to beat a professional monster-hunter wielding a sword with a name, I doubted I was going to be able to do much with a keytar and a car with crab claws. “In fact, I might be starting to agree with you that our little group might not be what you need. Does Gareth have any friends he could bring out to help you?”  
“No, unfortunately, Gareth is a famous Idolclastor, but he spends too much time brooding to find any comfort in the company of others,” Dr. Stew said. “He’s a fine boy that just wants to make his dead father proud, but his rage for justice exceeds his common sense. He has a bit of wolf in him, and he can be so bull-headed. I don’t want him mixed up with this, and the more professional Idolclastors involved, the more concerned I am about word getting out that my negligence may have founded an entirely new race of monstrous creatures beyond my control.”  
“Look, Doc, I’m not normally one that shies from fights, but I think I’m with Dwyn here,” Abby said. “We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”  
“And you sounded so confident earlier,” he smirked.  
“I’ve never heard Abby turn down a fight before—this must be serious,” Gloo said. “There are a lot of them, and those are just the ones that came on the raid—there might be more in the woods. They could have a whole village out there!”  
“Doc, I know you don’t want to bring your nephew into this, but this is bad,” I told him. “There could be a whole army out there, and we don’t know what they want. I know we want to think these are simple raids, but I’m a big history buff and this is reminding me a lot of a technique Goblins used to use—little raiding parties hit transports and weak points in fortifications to judge the defenses, then once they’re sure, they make a full attack. Ugh, for all we know, they’ve figured out that you have the Gem that made them in here, and they could be preparing to storm your lab and steal it so they can make more of themselves. We might be past the point of being cautious. If you’ve got any personal favors to call in from anybody open to fighting monsters, I’d call them in. Now. As soon as possible. We’ll head to the loading dock and see if we can find anything useful they left behind, and we might need to do some exploring around the crag to see if we can find anything else useful before we wind up starting a fight without knowing what we’re up against.”

Finally Dr. Stew agreed to recall his nephew and any discrete friends that might be willing to help, and while he was muttering off to his office to make the call, we headed to the service entrance. Dr. Stew and Gareth had rigged up some scrap metal into a temporary door to cover the entrance the things had made, but I doubted it would really hold. On one wall there was some poorly-hidden grafitti that said ‘HUMANS SUCK’.  
“Ugh. Guys,” I sighed. Hobb and I looked over the damage, Abby cast some sigils to fortify the door, and Gloo had taken off a glove to reach out a pseudopod and feel around. “This is big. I wish we even knew what we were up against. We need more information. Would that even help? Am I just being a big nerd and thinking information will save us from getting murdered by mutant monsters?”  
“You _are_ a big nerd, but I do think it would be worthwhile knowing if we are up against a dozen creepwads or a hundred,” Abby said. “I could probably try some Divination shit to look around, see if I can find where they’re at. Or maybe just cloak myself in darkness and sneak around for a while.” With a wave and a few mystical gestures, she disappeared into blackness.  
“Are you sure you won’t do something terrible like stab somebody while you’re there and get them all riled up?” I asked.  
“Well, I might not have before, but now that you’ve put the thought in my head it’s all I can think about,” her voice said from somewhere in the darkness.  
“Hey, I can find them pretty easy,” Gloo said. “You know how I can taste everything I touch?”  
“Ew,” Abby said, dispelling her cloak. “How can you possibly be a janitor?”  
“I’m 90% Ooze, I _love_ tasting things—it’s kind of a job perk,” she said. “But, like, all these exotic stray hairs and danders that are all over the place here? I could totally follow the trail and spy on them, see if they’re as tough as they sound. Plus, I’m literally a person-shaped goop-monster, I could probably blend in with them if it came to it. Only problem is figuring out what the heck I’m looking at when I get there.”  
“Think they’d mind a bioengineered flesh-construct?” Hobb asked. “They’re all-natural and I was built by scientists, so I doubt it, but I could totally load up a tape on, like, military tactics or something to see what’s going on. I’d say I could sneak around too, but I’m about as stealthy as a forklift.”  
“Or I could do this. **Shadow Cloak** ,” Abby cast. She cast more sigils of luminous black, this time around Hobb, and the Falcozoid was gone into dark space.  
“Do what?” Hobb asked.  
“Shadow Cloak, dude,” said Abby.  
“Oh! Am I invisible? Can you guys not see me?”  
“No, we can’t,” I said. “Yeah, this is good. Gloo, leave your containment-suit here and follow that trail. Hobb, stick with her and use your observational skills to bring us back some intel on what they’re up to. Abby and I will…we’ll do something.”  
“Sure thing, Mrs. Zygmund,” Hobb said. Gloo chuckled as she sloughed off her suit, shimmering her membrane in the light. (I always instinctively look away when she does that, since technically she’s stripping to the nude, even if her natural form was a featureless amoeba.) She tried forming her pink translucent body into a rough approximation of the mutants’ child-like physiques.  
“Nah, I’m no good at holding shapes,” she said, oozing out through the keyhole in the service door. “C’mon, Hobb! Let’s go do some spying. Do you have any cool spy music you can play?”  
“I think that would defeat the point of sneaking,” Hobb’s voice said from a shadow. I never saw them leave, but that was the last they said, so I figured they were gone.  
“Abby,” I said. “Oh, Abby. Abystress Darkenkunstler, Acolyte-Adept of the Dark Arts.”  
“Dwyn Purrlington, ridiculous nerd with a keytar,” she replied.  
“This is so bad,” I said. “We are in so far over our heads. I wish I could call for some backup. I wish there was a whole Zygmund Agency we could call in. Ugh! If I had known it was going to be this dangerous, I could have asked Dad and brought a trunk full of homunculi.”  
“I’m telling you, it’s ‘homunculodes’,” she corrected. “Whole load of homunculodes. But you know, maybe you don’t need Big Billy’s help here. I mean…we’ve got the fucking heart of a creator-god right there.”  
“Abby? No,” I said. “We’re in this because Dr. Stew has been messing with magic way above his level, and he might not be a spell-caster but he’s got a lot more experience with this stuff than you.”  
“Yeah, but, like, and hear me out here, right,” she said, “what if we did it anyway?”  
“I know you don’t like following the rules, but this is really high level stuff here,” I pleaded. “We’re here, desperate for ideas, specifically because somebody’s been messing with the Heart. My dad has shown me the books of regulations they have to follow to make sure the homunculi don’t rebel or hurt people. The fact that he was making me sit there and memorize these huge manuals is part of why I’m not going into the family business.”  
“So, wait, your complaint is that only somebody that knows best practices should mess with the Heart…and you yourself know best practices?”  
“Yeah, dude, it’s such complicated stuff, you wouldn’t believe…oh no. No, Abby, no.”  
“Yes, Abby, yes,” she grinned. “With my love of messing with magical artefacts way above my level and your love of memorizing rules, what could go wrong?”  
“So much could go wrong, Abby. So, so much. You have a lot of bad ideas, but this is a _really_ bad idea,” I told her. But it was too late: her mind was made up. “You’re going to do this with or without me, aren’t you?”  
“I am,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ITEMS & ENCOUNTERS:   
> • Purrlington Cat Factory: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/186806382034/   
> • Big Billy: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/182131544571/   
> • The Many-Fauceted Scarlet Emerald: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/612957395436584960/   
> • Duckbunny: official D&D, shockingly, although it was a minor monster created in Dragon Magazine in the 90s as a joke about how silly 1e monsters were, so your best source of information is nerdy listicles and blog posts about shitty monsters, such as http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2014/03/31/bizarre-bestiary-the-dreaded-duckbunny/   
> • Divination-Proof Cloak: aka Cloak of Non-Detection, aka Whispers of Silence: https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Whispers_of_Silence   
> • Hedgelord: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/623185377346420736/   
> • Dirtshark: renamed Bulette for the joke name  
> • Alolan Flumphs: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/185278387602   
> • Obese Marmot: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/611660615542538240/   
> • The Bird With Beautiful Man Arms: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/180135537777/ but renamed Flip the Bird because lol


	3. Chapter 3

A few hours later, Gloo and Hobb were back safely, unnoticed and unfollowed. Abby and I had built some minor horrors; I had narrowly managed to stop Abby from building us anything that would get us arrested for crimes against men and gods, and we left her putting the finishing touches to give Dr. Stew an update. He was in his office fiddling with paperwork, possibly trying to look busy so he didn’t have to talk to us.  
“So, Doctor,” I said. “Anything you haven’t told us?”  
“Not a thing,” he replied. “Why do you ask?”  
“Like, maybe, is the lab the only research facility in Taru?” Hobb asked.  
“It certainly should be,” Dr. Stew said. “Been out exploring, have you? I’ve been looking over some geological survey data to see if there might be anywhere else they’re hiding out.”  
“Wow, that’s handy!” Gloo said. “Did it say anything about a spooky secret dungeon with the entrance disguised by an illusion spell?”  
“It looks like there may be some underground chambers, but nothing to concern ourselves about where the creatures could be hiding a larger population,” he said. “I suppose I’m not surprised if they’ve found them, but if they’re using illusion-magic to disguise their movements, they are more dangerous than I knew—they could be hiding anywhere. We need to exteriminate them before they can spread. They’ll be hiding out in the woods somewhere, I’m sure of it.” From his pile of papers he unrolled a map of Taru. “The lab is here, this is the ridge where the creatures attacked the supply truck. I assume you tracked them? Where to?”  
“They’ve got sort of a little village in the woods over this way, but on the way we noticed a cave with its entrance disguised by magic, so we went ahead and took a look inside,” Gloo said. “We got in and I was like, whoa, this place looks super old! Like maybe from ancient times, way back before the War of Sundering—Dragon Days old. It looked like maybe some king a thousand years ago had a castle in Taru and had these dungeons down there as a holding area for his pet monsters.”  
“Really,” Dr. Stew said. “Imagine that. I suppose that explains all the unusual creatures mixed in with the wildlife—they must have been under some kind of dormancy spell, and the Beryl’s effusions must have woken from the slumber of centuries.”  
“Uh, no, the place just _looked_ that old,” Hobb said. “Actually couldn’t have been more than ten, fifteen years. Somebody had disguised it to look a lot older with a bunch of illusion-magic, but underneath a Sustained Major Image, some Portable Squalor, maybe a layer of spray-on dust, it looked like it was probably built around the same time as this lab. Probably the same contractor.”  
“How in the world could you tell that just by looking at it?”  
“Oh, my particular batch of Falcozoids had an experimental treatment so we’re totally immune to illusion-magic,” Hobb said, pointing out their silver-grey eyes. “Like True Seeing, but built right in and non-magical. It’s really annoying sometimes because a lot of storefronts and signs are illusions so I really shouldn’t drive most places, and most TVs in the Falcopolis use image-projection magic instead of electronics because the resolution is higher. That’s why I was so excited when I saw your no-magic surveillance setup—when you’re done with your research, I’d really like to borrow it so I can finally find out what I’m missing with all these situation-comedies people are always talking about. Like, what kind of situations are they getting into? The dad’s boss is coming over for dinner and the wife burnt the pie? Crazy—!”  
“Hobb,” I said.  
“Oh, yeah, sorry, the hive of monsters,” they replied. “Go ahead.”  
“Thanks,” I said, turning back to Dr. Stew and trying to look imposing. I felt my ears fold back. “Isn’t it curious, Doctor, how in that crowd of mutants, besides some of the smaller animals, there was exactly one of everything?”  
“Not the Flumphs,” he corrected.  
“Yeah, but they reproduce by budding when they’re feeling stressed, don’t they, Professor?” Hobb asked. “One of everything, huh. Not much of an ecology there.”  
“I told you, it sounds like some ancient beast-master—“  
“There’s nothing ancient about it, Dr. Stew,” I snapped. “Ugh. This whole facility is an old monster-building lab and you talked Dr. Quincunx into experimenting on them with the Beryl Heart. Now you’ve mutated them and everything else living here, and you were hoping to get it all cleaned up before he found out how bad you screwed up. Remember a minute ago when I asked if there was anything you hadn’t told us? Well, apparently there was, you asshole.”  
“Yes, well,” he seethed. “If you were an evil scientist trying to avoid being reported to civic authorities as well as your much-more-evil employer for inadvertantly creating an insurgent army of semi-intelligent monstrosities beyond your control, what would it take you to come completely clean? An adorable Catgirl asking nicely? I think not.”  
“Why would any of this possibly seem like a good idea? Why would you do this?”  
“I’m a scientist,” he snarled. “What am I supposed to do, have an idea and then not try it? Tsk, tsk. Laymen. I had the idea back when I was working on the Falcozoid project—the city wanted rugged, obedient clones, a mass-produced army, but I could do more. It would be more expensive, yes, potentially more dangerous if they went rogue, required tampering with powers beyond mortal reckoning, of course. But all in the name of science. When Dr. Pegasus was experimenting on the Lord-Falconer’s clone army to develop you freaks with spell-like abilities, she was basically throwing potion-ingredients at the wall to see what stuck; that’s why half of you never made it out of the biogenesis tubes. I left that project long ago to develop my own reserarch, and I’d say it’s been a wild success—the Heart has given me access to power I have only begun to understand. This god died to create you Animalfolk, and here you are—timid, ornery, anxious, simpering, combative, all the vices and quirks of any other race! All that power and it chose to just make more of the same. Like we needed more. I, meanwhile, am doing something worthwhile: building creatures that are tough, stoic, loyal, brave. I am looking for the building-blocks of the most perfect organism.” He stood up and began cramming his papers back into folders and envelopes.   
“So all their creepy little eyes that don’t look like they’d fit in their heads—?”  
“It’s still very much a work in progress,” he said. “I’ve only begun to understand what the Heart is capable of. Mind you, not all of these things were my work. There really were a few accidents—the songbirds, the mice, that awful turtle in the sunglasses. I certainly never intended to create the ultimate life-form out of a…a duckbunny.” He paused to pinch the bridge of his nose, although it looked like a practiced gesture. “I had made a breakthrough increasing the strength of the Beryl’s effusion, and out of an abundance of caution I purposely gave the strongest dose to a harmless animal—a hedgehog, not a porcupine, you idiot—and now Hedgelord is torn between a docile nature and the Elixir of Ultimate Life coursing through him. He is full of rage. He may not be the biggest, strongest, or fastest among them, but he is the most Human, and he will be organizing the rest of them against me. He knows about the lab and what I’ve done here, and he’ll want the Beryl for himself.”  
“How much of this does Dr. Quincunx actually know?” I asked. Dr. Quincunx frequently had his grad students running suspicious errands for him; Abby wasn’t the only one cleaning up messes for him. I didn’t like working for the man, but I also didn’t like to turn down business. I just hoped Abby had worked out a good contract with him.  
“The majority, I assume,” Dr. Stew replied. “When he insisted on hiring a party of NPCs to help me clean all this up, I assumed he was going to send a private army, so I was even more disappointed to meet the four of you and your idiotic crab-car. I wonder, does he think so much of his pupils or so little of my work? Perhaps he means you to botch the job and allow some of the creatures to escape so he can go on the news and pretend to be shocked while heaping the blame on my shoulders to ruin me. And that’s assuming I’m not killed during the fight.”  
“Yeah, Doc Q is a rich tapestry of bullshit and treachery,” said Abby, unfolding herself from another Cloak-of-Shadow. I hated when she did that—invisibility was great for a ZCDS tracker and amateur adventurer, but not so great in a friend that enjoys playing pranks. Casting Black Tentacles inside public restrooms was a favorite of hers. “Is this all a set-up and he’s going to count my War of the Many-Fauceted Beryl as my mid-term project so he doesn’t have to grade another essay? Is he hoping I get killed so he doesn’t have to grade another essay ever again? Is he using a Computronic Knowverlord to grade my essays so he doesn’t care one way or the other about them, and instead just wants us to whomp your Ultimate Life-Form so he can make fun of you for having a stick up your butt about how science is better than magic? And, finally, my good Dr. Soup, are any of the ideas you and I have posited here mutually exclusive?”  
“I’m really glad my boss isn’t an evil mastermind,” Hobb said to me.  
“I’m sure Mrs. Zygmund appreciates that,” I smiled. “Abby, I’m scared to ask, but what do you have for us?”  
“Toxic Goo Goon Squad,” she said. She whistled and a few of them skittered in.  
“What in the names of the gods are those monstrosities?” Dr. Stew stammered.  
“Like you’re one to talk. Don’t talk to my babies like that, you’re the monster here,” Abby said. “These horrific little shit-wads I created out of whatever equipment I could salvage from your lab, Dwyn’s half-remembered instructions on how to build a homunculus, and some of the leftover ooze from the Beryl you’ve got lying around, which it turns out was still infected with critter bits from when you were making the mutants. I mean, yeah, they all look terrible, and this one has literally not stopped barfing since it came to life, but it doesn’t seem to mind, and I really don’t think they’re any worse than your things.”  
“Yeah, Professor, at least they haven’t called you a rude word yet,” Hobb snickered.  
“I think they’re cute!” Gloo said. She had sat on the floor cross-legged and was petting a three-armed lobster-thing while a small skinless dog yapped at her. “Dwyn, can we keep them? You were just saying we need backup for emergencies, and you know I’d clean up after them. Imagine we were fighting some uptight Necro-Xysticus and we open up a bag-of-holding and all these little guys jump out!”  
“Uh, well—“  
“Gloo, sorry, girl, but I did _not_ know what I was doing when I made these,” Abby said. “These things are held together with the magical equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum, and are probably going to fall apart pretty quick. Look, the one I made out of a shop-vac already lost its face and it’s trying to vacuum it up. They are adorable, I agree, and I’m sure as hell gonna try again some time, because this was rad as hell and made me remember why I decided to go to the Academy instead of becoming a Warlock and just having some asshole demon do everything for me. But as for these guys, statistically I would guess about a quarter of them are going to explode within the next few hours, so I think we should attack as soon as possible.”  
“Wait, wait, wait—who said anything about attacking them?” I asked. “I mean, yeah, the mutants that attacked the lab seem aggressive, but we haven’t talked to them. Maybe if we find out what they want—“ From the security office we heard a beep—the proximity alarm as something was approaching the building, followed by a tinny synthesizer’s attempt at a triumphant brass flourish.  
“If you didn’t want them to be attacked, you probably should not have asked me to recall Gareth,” Dr. Stew said. “That will be him; the security system is keyed to recognize his biosignature.”  
“And play his theme song,” Hobb chuckled. We all crowded into the security office to watch him arrive; for the moment all we could see was a cloud of dust approaching.  
“Just him?”  
“It appears so,” Dr. Stew sighed. “He’s a bit of a lone wolf; he insists he can handle the Berylians. I wish he wasn’t so bull-headed.” The dust cloud had resolved now into the biggest motorcycle I had ever seen. Just short of the door, the bike whipped sideways and skidded to a halt, framed so perfectly in the camera he had to have planned it. Leaving his plain black leather jacket on the seat, Gareth jumped down to the ground—the motorcycle was so huge he had to clear a gap to touch down—and he pulled off his helmet, shaking his long jet-black hair free and revealing a small pair of golden horns. He was a massive slab of man with plenty of rugged-looking scars and a jaw like it was designed for cracking walnuts. His hair, eyes, and stubble were jet black and he wore a simple black tee and jeans with three separate scabbards strapped to his back, one broadsword and two smaller ones.  
“Hey, Uncle Berreth,” he said into the security camera. He jerked his head at the parked Crabero. “Looks like we’ve got company. Who are you trying to replace me with now?”  
“Gareth, I have some people here for you to meet from Zygmund Collection & Disposal Services. They’ll be helping you out on this matter.”  
“Send them home,” Gareth said. “If these creatures are as dangerous as you say, Uncle, I won’t put other lives in jeopardy. I will fight these creatures alone.”  
“Dude, we just watched the footage of you getting your finely chiseled ass handed to you,” Abby told him.  
“I underestimated my opponents. A mistake,” Gareth seethed. “And I never make the same mistake twice.”  
“Come on inside,” Dr. Stew said. “I’ll buzz you in. We’re in the security lounge.”  
“No thanks, Uncle,” he said. He flashed a grin, exposing oversized canines. “Meet me on the roof. They took a few shots at me as I was coming in; none of them can match my bike’s speed, but they’ll be here soon. They’re coming.” He leapt onto a drainpipe and began clambering up.  
“Charming fellow,” I remarked as we headed upstairs. “I hope I’m not intruding, Doctor, but I’m really not seeing a lot of family resemblance…?”  
“My brother was a field-researcher in the Yawning Gulf, and Gareth’s mother was a Tiefling princess of the Moh Khapp Corsairs,” Dr. Stew said, trying not to sound too proud. “They met when her crew attacked his research vessel and had a brief but passionate fling before he was killed by her crew. Gareth grew up among them until her ship was destroyed by a Void Kraken and she was killed. He barely made it out alive and he followed his father’s journal to stay with me at the Academy until he could become an Idolclastor and avenge his mother’s death, using combat training from Captain Byronicus Shinobi himself—“  
“Uh, I’m pretty sure he’s a trans-species flesh-construct,” Hobb said.  
“What?” Dr. Stew snapped.  
“Yeah, a lot of his cool-looking scars are obviously assembly joints—he’s not a factory-job like me or one of those gross old-school piles of stitched-together corpses with the neckboltronics, he was freaking _crafted_ ,” they said. “And then the creature reference index I loaded earlier lets me identify special feats and traits, so I’m pretty sure he’s made mostly of vat-grown Human tissue, probably sampled from Dr. Stew himself, but with some Wolf mixed in, Elixir of Bull’s Strength—”  
“Be quiet, damn you,” Dr. Stew hissed. “I’m beginning to see why the Lord-Falconer decided not to make any more of you. Fine, yes, Gareth is a previous attempt at creating the ultimate organism. I built him to be everything I’m not—strong, tough, decisive, aggressive, fearless, loyal, with memories programmed to motivate him to fight injustice and monsters. He was engineered to excel at everything he does, but he turned out too perfect and and is too concerned with justice to take his rightful place as the leader of a superior new race, which is why my research continues. Are there any other deep, dark secrets you would like to hear? I soiled myself on the playground once when I was three. Happy? What about you, she-ooze? Any hidden truths you’d like to share with the group?”  
“No, Hobb’s the perceptive one,” Gloo said. “Although as long as we’re coming clean about things, I might have snuck into the breakroom before we left on the secret spying mission earlier and ate your lunch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ITEMS & ENCOUNTERS:  
> • Portable Squalor: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/625481726310989824/   
> • Knowverlord: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/621645224719040512/   
> • Toxic Goo Goon Squad: see a full gallery at http://toyarchive.com/TrashBagBunch/FullGallery.html   
> • Gareth Stew: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MartyStu   
> • Gareth’s giant motorcycle: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/179174749196


	4. Chapter 4

On the roof, Gareth greeted Dr. Stew with a right-handed handshake and a left-handed shoulder grab. He was even larger in person, although now that Hobb had pointed out the joints between his assembled slabs of flesh, I had to fight myself from staring. He noticed my attention and avoided eye contact, surveying the group. “This is all we have to work with?”  
“Weren’t you just complaining about wanting to take the mutants on single-handed?” Abby asked.  
“Competent professionals would be fine, but I won’t have innocent blood on my hands,” he said. He drew his dual Puraso-Ni-Dexu katanas, which I recognized from his profile in one of the Idolclastor trade journals, and pointed one at me. “You, cat. What can you do?”  
“I’m, well, I’m learning some cantrips on my keytar,” I said, holding it up. Technically I also handled human resources and I’m pretty good with spreadsheets, but it didn’t feel worth mentioning just now.  
“Might be useful if we were going to have a singalong,” Gareth said through clenched teeth. “How about you? You’re an augmented Falcozoid, right? Anything combat-oriented?”  
“Uh, no,” Hobb said. “Well, I can’t see illusions at all, so I can make sure nobody’s hiding or disguised or trying to pass themselves off as anything they aren’t.” Gareth flicked his eyes to Dr. Stew, then back to Hobb.  
“Could come in handy,” he muttered. “You?”  
“I don’t have blood, so you won’t have any of it on your hands,” Gloo said.  
“Can you do anything useful?”  
“How about this?” She quickly sloughed off her suit again, returning to her loose globular form. Since the trip across the landscape she seemed to have picked up a fair amount of dead grass and clumps of dirt, visible through her translucent flesh.  
“Captain Shinobi often said the key to unarmed combat was to stay loose,” he smirked. “You’ll take point—claws and teeth won’t do anything to you, keeping us free for the tough ones. What about you, Elf? What are you supposed to be with that hood?”  
“Darkenkunstler, bitch,” she replied, casting a few quick sigils and lobbing a couple balls of black flame at him. With his twin blades he slashed the orbs from the air.  
“Relying on magic to do the work for you? Sloppy.”  
“Relying on magic to distract you while my army of horrible goons sneaks up on you? Priceless.” Her swarm of things swept onto him like a wave, and he recoiled, shaking a snarling trash-bag from his left hand and a screaming bat-thing from his right, narrowly skirting the instrinct to slice them to bits with his swords. As Abby laughed (and Hobb and I tried not to), he backed out of the Goons’ midst with a sneer.  
“Cheap move, Elf,” he snarled. “A coward’s move. A true warrior fights with honor.”  
“Yeah, that’s why true warriors get sniped by assholes like me or Hedgelord,” she said. She grabbed him by the neck with a Black Tentacle and jerked him to the ground just in time for a bullet to fly through the space where his head had been. We looked at its source and saw a thorny head glaring at us over the edge of the roof.  
“Somebody say my name? Don’t wear out the handle,” it hissed. “What’s up, losers? I’m the boss-dude of this cool crew.”  
“Yeah, haha!” said one of the person-faced Flumphs, bright pink; with gloved hands on the ends of its tendrils, it was carrying Hedgelord by the shoulders and gently sat him down on the roof. Gareth faced it as we crowded around his back and I wondered if he had a plan beyond ‘fight them’. A yellow-green Flumph and a bright blue one arrived with the beefy human-armed bird, the duckbunny arrived under its own wing-power, and the Dirtshark clambered up over the ledge with its own claws. Another much-larger set of talons gripped the edge but no face appeared, only grunts of effort from below.  
“Wait up, fellas!” cried the thing.  
“Just chill, Flatwood, we’ll be done here in a sec,” the duckbunny called down to it.  
“If these normo dorks know what’s good for them,” smirked the Dirtshark. It was wearing one of Gareth’s black shirts, hung loose on its undersized frame. “Name’s Darkshirt.”  
“I’m Bucky the Duckbunny,” its friend said cheerfully. “That’s Flatwood the Owlbear down there, and this is Flip the Bird.” The bird with the human arms made a noise that I think was an attempt at chirping menacingly. “The Flumphs are Strawbs, Dacquiri, and Blue Razz. Hmm, let’s see, who else—“  
“I don’t care,” Gareth snarled. “What do you want?”  
“Simmer down, chump—you buzzed our village with that big-ass bike and we just wanted to come see what’s shaking down at Lamewad Central,” Hedgelord said.  
“Radical!” added the blue flumph. The others giggled and Dacquiri gave it a high five.  
“Sorry if I interrupted nap-time in the Fluffy Animal Village,” Gareth said. “You guys head back home peacefully and I’ll get the cat-girl to swing by and play you a lullaby. How’s that sound?”  
“Hey, no problemo; we can make tracks in half a sec, dude,” said Hedgelord. “Just fork over the Beryl and we’ll be out of your hair.”  
“No deal,” said Gareth.  
“Quit busting up Doc Soup’s shit and get your gangly asses back in the woods, you prickly ball-sack,” Abby added.  
“I told you this was a waste of time, H.L.,” Darkshirt told his leader. “I could have torn the foundation out from under the place real easy. We could have found the Beryl no problem.”  
“Now, hold on, guys, we don’t want to hurt anybody,” goodcopped Bucky. “I’m sure these normos are smart enough to do the right thing.” Flip the Bird tried to add something, chirping angrily like an irritated flute.  
“Who says we don’t want to hurt anybody?” asked Darkshirt.  
“Guess it depends how cooperative they are,” Hedgelord said. “So, what’ll it be? Hand over the Beryl so we can take proper care of it, or do we have to do this the hard way?”  
“Why do you want it?” I asked.  
“What, you trust this poindexter with it?” it asked. “He doesn’t know what it really does, what it’s like to go through it. We know. We’ll take good care of it.”  
“And then build an army of monstrosities to pillage the Falcopolis and reign supreme?” Dr. Stew asked.  
“Natch,” Hedgelord said. “How’d you know?”  
“It’s what I’d do,” he said.  
“Uncle Berreth?” Gareth asked.  
“Heh heh. Ask ‘im, Gary,” Hedgelord sneered. “Ask him why he made us, why he wants to build bigger, badder, butt-kicking-er bros. He built you to be his perfect boy, but apparently you can still improve on perfection. And here I am, big bro. Think you’re tough, Gary? I’ve seen tougher—every time I look in the mirror. Doc mashed play on this jam, and now you’re all gonna dance.”  
“What’s he talking about, Uncle Berreth?” Gareth asked his father.  
“Uh, does he not know?” Hobb asked. “I know they tried to give me a proper memory upload, but Dr. Pegasus’ cruddy wiring kept it from taking. Did you get it right and give him a fake childhood?”  
“Hobb, maybe quit blurting things out?” I cried, grabbing them by the shoulder. The Beryl mutants cackled.  
“Tell me what all this is about, Uncle Berreth, now,” Gareth said. Dr. Stew stammered, glaring at Hedgelord, Hobb, me, and back again. I sighed and grabbed the ZCDS crew for a huddle.  
“Looks like we’re in for some male brooding and daddy issues and shit, which I would much rather sit out,” I told them. “What’s the plan here?”  
“I could grab them all and smother them with my goops and we could be done here in, like, five minutes,” Gloo said.  
“Girl, I am shocked you would suggest such a thing,” Abby said. “If anybody’s going to attack them, it’s going to be my Army of Horrible Babies.”  
“I really don’t want to kill a bunch of sapient mini-Animalfolk,” I said. “Probably also don’t want them to take the Beryl Heart and kill us either, though. They’re toying with us right now. They’ve got an Owlbear down there; they could tear the walls down right now and take it. Any theories why they don’t?”  
“I took a look over the edge and I don’t think Flatwoods the Owlbear is the type to tear down walls,” Hobb said. “Remember the tutu?”  
“The Flumphs don’t seem to into it either,” I said. “I can’t tell if the Duckbunny is really trying to keep things peaceable or if it’s just playing a role, and I think the bird with the human arms is just mad that it can’t fly anymore. So that’s two out of, what, eight?”  
“Nine, you forgot the Displacer-Beast,” Hobb said.  
“The what?”  
“Remember, the one that looks like it has dreads? It was up here for a minute, then it ran around the edge and ducked downstairs, and now it’s back. See it over there talking to Hedgelord?”  
“I don’t see anything,” Gloo said.  
“Hobb, Displacer-Beasts use magic to look like they’re in a different place than they are,” I said. “We never saw it.”  
“Oh! Oh,” they replied. “Nobody else reacted so I figured it wasn’t a big deal. Uh, that’s probably a bad sign then.”   
“Ugh. Yes, Hobb, it is,” I said. Having a friend that saw through illusions could be really helpful, but only when they knew to say something, and Hobb always had a loose grasp on what might be important to bring up. “Is it up here now? Anything happening?”  
“No, just Hedgelord pulling out the gun—“ There was a single shot, and we turned to see Gareth hit the ground, a smoldering hole through his forehead. Everyone turned to Hedgelord.  
“Sorry, hearing them argue was fun at first, but I got bored,” it shrugged. He fired twice more into the Idolclastor’s chest. “Darkshirt? The word from Dust the Displacer is to go twenty degrees to your left and down a floor. Snag the gem for me, but I got dibs on levelling up—nobody else gets to go before me. Got me?”  
“Sure thing, boss-dude,” the Dirtshark grinned, then jumped into the air with a ridiculous flip and landed face-first on the asphalt roof, tearing through it with its drill-nose and claws.  
“Well, Doc, it’s been real—real lame,” Hedgelord smirked. He high-fived the Flumphs in triumph, but I think they were just happy to be included. “Anybody else wanna get popped in the dome?” He was staring at us, twirling the gun on his finger. “Didn’t think so.”  
“Violence isn’t cool, Hedgelord,” Gloo said, rushing towards him in liquid form—and carrying Abby’s Goon Squad. He managed to get a few shots off but the bullets caught in her gelatinous form, and then he was engulfed. Bucky backed off in horror, a three-armed lobster on his tail; Flip tried to help his leader but Gloo writhed so that the path of his feathered fists went straight into Hedgelord’s face. The Flumphs chattered in protest, but besides feebly slapping at the Goon Squad, they didn’t seem to be impacting anything.  
“Violence is rad as hell, actually! Go, my pretties! Kill!” Abby cried. I glanced over at Dr. Stew, who had pulled some tools out from his pockets and was trying to help Gareth. The shot to the head had exposed metal underneath, but all three wounds were bleeding pretty badly.  
“What the hell are you looking at me for?” he spat. “Get down there and stop them! Under no circumstances should Hedgelord be allowed access to the Heart. It seems to respond to the user’s emotional input; if he’s the result of my anger and disappointment in the world, there’s no telling what it could do for him.”  
“Hobb, come on,” I told them. The wrestling mass of Gloo, Hedgelord, the Goon Squad, the Flumphs, and Flip the Bird were between us and the stairs that lead down to the gem lab, and Abby was busy using tentacles of darkness to jab Gareth’s various swords into the rumble while Hedgelord tried to wrestle them away from her.  
“Hey, you don’t know how to cast Feather Fall, do you?” Hobb asked me.  
“What, and just jump two stories down?” I asked. “Yeah, I can probably do that. Come on.”  
“Uh, you say ‘probably’?”  
“Yeah, no, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I lied. I felt especially bad because we Catfolk have the dexterity to avoid most falling damage, so Hobb would be the one in trouble if I messed up, but this was some way-above-our-level world-in-peril adventuring we had fallen into. We ran over to the edge of the roof and I looked for a spot close to the parking lot that might not hurt Hobb too bad, but we were greeted by a huge-eyed face on top of a furry and feathery twelve-foot form in a tutu.  
“What’s going on up there?” Flatwoods asked. “Are my friends okay?”  
“Uh, yeah, everybody’s fine up here, thanks,” Hobb said. “How’s it going down there?”  
“Fine, I guess,” she said. I glanced over at the Crabero to see if it was okay; she followed my eyes. “Oh! Right! I was supposed to smash this so you guys couldn’t follow us! Sheesh, I’m such a scatterbrain.” She turned and began to walk over. I panicked.  
“Um— **Mage Hand Punch**!” I cast, mashing the chords as quick as I could on my keytar. Most of a spectral fist appeared and careened at the Owlbear, punching her in the back of the neck.  
“Ow! Hey! That really hurt!” she whined, turning to face us. With a leap she cleared the distance and had her claws in the ledge in front of us, pulling the rest of her bulk up behind them. The first thing she did was to yank the keytar out of my hands and toss it over the ledge.  
“I’m still making payments on that, you bitch!” I cried. I knew there wasn’t much I could do against an Owlbear on my own, so I jumped over the ledge after it. On the ground I had to dig through the overgrown brush to find it, but the impact had rattled something loose. It was useless. I glanced over at the unguarded Crabero. Hopefully Hobb was all right up there on their own. I saw a hole in the ground that looked like it had been made by a Dirtshark—probably where the mutants had come through. It looked like it was going to be up to me. I tossed the broken keytar in the backseat and clambered into the Crabero’s driver’s seat, flexing the claws; they might get the Beryl out of the containment room, but they weren’t getting it into their tunnels. With the Crabero’s powerful arms I collapsed the tunnel’s entrance, then turned back, ready to fend off whatever mutants might come out.  
“Hello there,” came a voice from the hood—that little dreadlocked thing, smirking at me. I swiped the Crabero’s claw at it, but it disappeared, popping back in the seat next to me. I saw he was holding a switchblade. “Pro tip, hot shot: don’t aim where I was, but where I will be.” He flicked me on the nose with his finger and laughed. “If you can!” He was gone again.  
“Shit,” I muttered. He was displacing all around the Crabero, teasing me. I had a small dagger and a bottle of mace on me, but neither one was going to work on this little asshole. Suddenly from the lab roof there came a peculiar sound.  
“Wheeeeee…!” A tangle of blue limbs was on its way down, swooping towards us.  
“What the—gah!” came the Displacer’s voice from the Crabero’s hood as the form of Hobb, carried by Blue Razz the Flumph, landed hard on him boot-first, then picked him up by the dreds. Visions of the Displacer popped in and out all over the Crabero but Hobb kept their grip, punching him in the face until the visions stopped.  
“Shit, Hobb,” I said as they tossed the limp mutant into a bush.  
“He’ll be fine, he’s just out cold,” they said. They clambered over the windshield and into the passenger seat. “C’mon, Razz. This is Dwyn, she’s cool.”  
“Cool!” the Flumph said, moving into the back seat and smiling politely. It didn’t actually touch the seat, hovering.  
“Abby and Gloo still have the roof crew busy, and Doc got Gareth up and moving again, mostly,” Hobb told me. “You were right, most of the Berylians couldn’t care less about Hedgelord’s plans; they just want the Beryl because it’s leveled the plantlife up to something that actually grows edible fruit. Hedgelord’s got really high charisma so they tend to do what he says, but honestly a lot of them are just super suggestible, it turns out. Right, Razz?”  
“Radical!” the Flumph grinned.  
“Oh, but the Owlbear will probably figure out where I went in a minute, so—oh, there she is.” Flatwoods landed with a thud, her legs astride the entrance to the lab, just as Darkshirt emerged, helping a snake-person and a purple marmot carry out the Beryl, followed by a wooden thing with a rabbit’s head.  
“Hey, dumbasses! You know I can just dig another hole, right?” Darkshirt asked.  
“You don’t have to do what Hedgelord says!” I called to it. “I know most of you don’t want to hurt anybody.”  
“No, but some of us do,” Darkshirt said. “Scroobius? Craunch? You guys like beating up bad guys? How about you, Stumpy?”  
“Word up, boss-dude!” said the wooden thing from a mouth in its chest, the rabbit’s head sitting immobile. “Nerts to evildoers!”  
“I don’t like violence, but we have to do what’s right,” Flatwood the Owlbear added. “That mad scientist is polluting the forest and wants us all dead. We just want to leave peacefully, and Hedgelord says the best way to do that is to defeat the evil doctor and retrieve the Beryl Heart so we can level up more plants to live off—did you see the meat-melons? Us carnivores don’t have to feel weird eating fellow critters anymore without worrying if they’re somebody’s cousin! Much better than those nasty Rotisserie Chicken Pops we stole from the van, yuck.”  
“I like the one that grows tortilla chips,” said Craunch the Marmot. “Here I thought eating rocks was good!”  
“It made me a vine that grows little mouse-fruits,” said Scroobius the Snake. “Now I don’t have to keep wearing my hat over my head to keep from being tempted to eat Craunch or that family of squirrels.”  
“It made me a cube of dandelions,” said the Flumph. “I can’t eat it, but it made me smile, and I eat smiles, so it was good. Yay!”  
“What about that thing where Hedgelord wants to pillage the Falcopolis and take over?” Hobb asked.  
“Well, yeah, gotta overthrow the corrupt power structure that funds the evil doctor’s work,” Stumpy said.  
“Kill you guys if you stand between us and the Beryl, too, I guess,” Craunch the Marmot added.  
“What if I told you your evil doctor is operating totally illegally out here and would probably be in prison if the Falcopolis government knew what he was doing?” I asked. “I’d arrest him myself if I could. We don’t want to hurt you guys. Honestly if it weren’t for Hedgelord and Darkshirt being such assholes I’d feel better leaving the Heart with them than with Dr. Stew.”  
“Stop talking to them! You know Hedgelord says not to trust lamewad outsiders like these dorks!” Darkshirt barked. “You know they work for the Man.”  
“Hey, that’s not true at all—our job is barely legal,” I snapped. “Dr. Stew is the one that’s after you, and we hate him too. He’s incredibly irresponsible to create you guys as experiments and then when you don’t come out evil enough for him, he sends poor Gareth after you. Look, all four of us know what it’s like to be outcasts—Hobb and Gloo are rejects from a cloning program, Abby was exiled from the Elves for, well, general chaos, really, and…okay, my dad’s pretty rich for Catfolk, but that’s after fighting years of oppression in the homunculus industry, and if another person calls me adorable or ‘kitten’ or tries to distract me with a ball of yarn—ugh. Wait, sorry, what was I talking about? Oh, right. I’m sorry the Humans have been such jerks to you, and I can’t say they aren’t all like that. Elves are even worse, and the Bumpkins and the Dwarves are confused by anyone with a different value system, but, uh, Goblins are equally assholes to everyone and some Orques are pretty cool, as long as you don’t make eye contact—“  
“Really making the case for your society, huh?” Darkshirt asked.  
“Well, it’s not like any of those guys are going to come out to Taru,” Hobb said. “Honestly, if most of you guys aren’t really into overthrowing society, you’d probably be a lot safer and happier just building a new society out here. As long as you don’t use the Heart too much to overpopulate, nobody would ever notice.”  
“You’d…let us keep the Heart?” Flatwood asked.  
“Not really ours to give or take, I figure,” Hobb said. “Nobody seems to know how it showed up in the Academy’s secret archives, which is probably academic code for it was stolen, and then Dr. Stew stole it a second time to get it here. He might not like if we let you keep it, but, uh, he’ll be in a ridiculous amount of trouble if he tries to explain it to anybody, and our instructions on coming out here were super vague, so we can do whatever we want.”  
“Just please don’t keep raiding transports and deliveries,” I added. I was not at all at ease with this plan, but it was this or try and fight them all into submission, and we were barely surviving in one-on-one combat—I didn’t want to see what they were like en masse. “You got lucky that the one truck you knocked over was owned by somebody that wanted to keep it quiet. If Doc Stew had made an official complaint to the Guild of Idolclastors, you’d have a couple dozen Gareths tearing their way through the forest right now on shark-tanks and, like, horses that are also werewolves.”  
“Not that you need to keep mutating bigger and stronger friends to defend yourselves or anything,” Hobb said, nudging me.  
“Right, right,” I said. “I’d maybe ease off creating the aggressive vengeance-seeking monsters.”  
“Yeah, wouldn’t want us defending ourselves, would you?” Darkshirt said.  
“No! Yes! No! Defend yourselves! Absolutely,” I stammered, “but maybe don’t go attacking the rest of us? Look, Dr. Stew’s an asshole, Gareth’s an idiot, and the four of us are, let’s be honest, kind of losers. That’s who you’re dealing with now. But trying to invade the Falcopolis is suicide. It’s full of wizards and thieves and professional fighters that love an excuse to kill and bards that actually know how to play their instruments. Do you know how many cults have tried it? How many Undertoad raiding parties have gotten squashed into frog jelly by perimeter defenses? Have you ever heard of Erolotus the Teratoforge or the Colossus Wars or the Orange Horrors?”  
“Have you ever heard of my butt?” demanded Hedgelord, hopping down from the roof, gun in hand, spiking one of Abby’s Toxic Goons on the ground ahead of him with one of Gareth’s katanas stuck through it. “Finally got free from that pink snotball; Strawbs and Dacquiri have the Elf-witch occupied and Dr. Stew-pid is still busy trying to get ol’ Gary’s motor running. D.S., why didn’t you yell that you had the Heart? We coulda booked it and been home for chili dogs by now! What’s the holdup, dudes?”  
“They said they’d give us the Heart and get rid of Dr. Stew for us,” Stumpy said.  
“We wouldn’t have to attack the city and kill people,” said Scroobius.  
“We could live peacefully in the forest and take care of ourselves,” Flatwood said.  
“Eat as much as we like,” Craunch added.  
“Radical,” Razz said.  
“Oh, boy! Cowering in a hollow log eating magic berries! That sounds like a sweet life— _not!_!” Hedgelord chuckled. “I guess if some of you dudes are so lame that sounds like a good time to you, fine, but I’m living for myself and standing up for what’s right! Nobody pushes me around, and if you don’t have the guts to use the Heart to do some pushing of your own, fork it over!”  
“No,” said Flatwood, grabbing it. She was the tallest of them, towering over the others’ child-like forms. “If you’re just going to return evil for evil, I don’t think you should be in charge anymore.”  
“Uncool decision, dudette,” Hedgelord said, cocking his gun. “I said fork it over, and I don’t remember stuttering. Got me?”  
“No, H.L., I don’t think I will,” she said. The Beryl coughed a dull glow and bright crimson liquid sputtered from the faucets that the heist crew hadn’t torn out and the Owlbear grew slightly bigger.  
“I’m no gunslinger, but I’m pretty sure a little handgun like that wouldn’t do much to a regular bear,” I said, “much less an Owlbear juiced up on Divine magic runoff.”  
“Huh,” Hedgelord said. I think he knew it too. “Darkshirt, Flatwood’s gone loco; you wanna snag that jewel for your main man?”  
“Sure thing, H.L.—“ Before he could do anything, Flatwood hoisted up one massive foot and punted him into the distance.  
“The only thing I like less than a bully is someone that does whatever a bully tells them,” she announced.  
“That’s cool, that’s cool,” Hedgelord said, grabbing Craunch the Marmot. “What about radical dudes that get betrayed by their crew so they take one of the losers hostage to try and get things back on track?”  
“You’re out of bullets, aren’t you?” Hobb asked.  
“Honestly, I haven’t been counting,” replied Hedgelord. “Who feels lucky?” He tried to put the gun to Craunch’s head, but the marmot turned and grabbed it in its teeth and bit a chunk out of it. “Fuck, seriously?”  
“Lame to the max, boss-dude,” the blue Flumph chided him.  
“To the double max!” called the pink one from the roof.  
“Word!” added the green one. With Hedgelord downstairs, the participants in the rooftop brawl seemed to have realized the tensions had shifted and came to the ledge to watch; Flip the Bird looked badly bruised and Bucky the Duckbunny was riddled with marks I recognized as the sign that Abby had been bolstering the Toxic Goon Squad with shadow-magic. Gloo was trying to fit back into her containment suit, but her slime was filthy with feathers and grit from continuous fighting. Abby had fallen back from the fight to help Dr. Stew keep Gareth alive, and they had propped him up alongside them, shirtless, dizzy but awake. I wondered if the onyx runes she had placed around the wounds were going to be permanent or not.  
“He stole my sunglasses!” Gareth bellowed.  
“Got your keys, too,” Hedgelord said, jingling them with a smirk. “Thought I’d be leading the vanguard of the Berylian Liberation Army, but apparently I’m striking out on my own. Which is fine by me! These dorkwads were cramping my style anyway. Just remember, all of you: this ain’t over! Smell you later, losers!” With a flip he leapt up to the seat of Gareth’s giant motorcycle, put on the leather jacket, and drove off.  
“Shit,” I spat, starting to give chase in the Crabero, but he was long gone—the bike was built for speed and anything on ten legs was never going to catch up to it. “Abby, can you track him with your magic? Maybe we can cut him off before he gets to the city—“  
“What’s he gonna do there?” she asked. “Without the Heart and his army of followers, he’s just another moody asshole. Hell, he’ll probably blend in. Hey, can somebody get us down from here? That Landshark tore the building up pretty bad, I don’t think it’s going to stand much longer.”  
“Stole my motorcycle!” Gareth wheezed.  
“Never mind about that, nephew,” Dr. Stew said. “I’ve been thinking, you could really use something more classic and heroic anyway. What would you say to a nice, majestic unicorn?”  
“Black one.”

“And that’s our final report,” I told Dr. Quincunx back at the Academy. His five glowing eyes smoldered from under his hood. Dr. Stew had tried to get out of coming back with us, but Gareth had insisted on justice being served. We told Dr. Quincunx everything, mostly because we knew better than to lie to the Evil Studies department head. Gareth had returned to the Guild for his next assignment, while Dr. Stew had sat silently and listened while we told the story.  
“So where is the gem heart now?” he asked.  
“The Berylians have it,” Gloo said. “They’ve been using it in the caverns to develop agriculture so they can subsist, and it looks like they’ve elected Flatwood to be their president.”  
“How do you know they won’t use it to create more monsters and invade the city after all?”  
“None of them were ever really that into the idea and it’s not like it would do them any good,” Hobb said. “They’ve got everything they need and the only thing that will change that is if they draw too much attention to themselves.”  
“Gareth is making a classified report to the Guild of Idolclastors about Hedgelord and Darkshirt, leaving out most of the details about where they came from and how many others there are,” Abby said. “He’s not a great liar, but hopefully the greater justice is served by letting the weirdos live in peace.”  
“Odd comment coming from you, pupil,” Dr. Quincunx said. She shrugged.  
“Yeah, not the most evil thing to do, but I knew it would piss you off, so I went for it,” she smirked.  
“Being annoying is not the same as being evil, Abystress,” he replied. “We’ve had this conversation repeatedly.”  
“I know, it’s almost like I’m doing it on purpose,” she said. Dr. Quincunx sighed.  
“And, now, you, Dr. Stew,” he said finally. “Well, Berreth, you lied to me, stole Academy property, tinkered with forces beyond comprehension, accidentally created a race of horrible mutants, including an intelligent, charismatic little monster with a lust for revenge, and then let it escape into the countryside, where it no doubt seethes in anger and plots the demise of you and everyone else in this room.”  
“Yes, sir,” Dr. Stew said.  
“Takes me back,” Dr. Quincunx said, leaning back in his chair, talons folded behind his head. “I was young and demented like that once, you know. One of the downsides to learning a thousand schools of forbidden magic is that these days there’s hardly any forces left beyond my comprehension; really takes the fun out of it. You know, as things currently stand, I’m not going to punish you any further. Knowing that bulbous-eyed spaghetti-limbed freak is lurking somewhere in the Realms—in the city, maybe, could be right here in this room right now, hard to tell—plotting your grisly demise, well, that’s probably punishment enough. Will he stab you in the back? Have his Dirtshark pal dig the foundation out from under your house so it collapses on top of you in the night? Taint your broth with Liquid Sword Potion so you drink it and it slices you apart from the inside? Could be anything! I guess I should technically write up an academic censure in case anybody notices that the Heart is missing from the Archives, but that’s fine. Slap on the wrist. Nobody reads the damn things anyway.” He paused to take out a blood-laced cigarette; he offered us each one before lighting his own from one of the flaming skulls that lit his office. “Now all that’s just where we are right now. If the cops start asking questions, that’s another thing. I’ll deny it all, and if I’m implicated you’ll wish I’d turned you over to that spiky little bastard. I won’t just feed you Liquid Sword Potion, I’ll teleport a dollop inside each cell in your body one by one until you’re so finely diced you’ll look like a less charming version of Gloo. So, maybe you want to track that little shit down and make sure it doesn’t draw any attention to the Academy. Got me?”  
“Yes, sir,” Dr. Stew said simply.  
“In fact, maybe there’s a talented group of under-the-table not-quite-Idolclastors nearby that might be interested in taking the job?” Dr. Quincunx went on. “And maybe because it’s not official school business, you’ll pay them real money instead of experience and class credit, unlike a recent job they did where I suspect the company rep I worked with will regret not asking for a formal contract stating the terms of engagement? Perhaps she may even finally learn that there’s a limit to how fun and quirky it is to be pure chaotic in alignment?” I glared at her.  
“God damn it, Abby,” I said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ITEMS & ENCOUNTERS:  
> • Rotisserie Chicken Popsicle: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/622470056274739200   
> • Scroobius the Snake: https://randomencounters.tumblr.com/post/174816899994/   
> • Dorito plant: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/614210554630946816/   
> • Cube of dandelions: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/170653786620   
> • Liquid Sword: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/175885967608/ and the functionally identical Potion of Stabbing https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/189508422569/   
> • Cigarettes for Monsters: https://randomitemdrop.tumblr.com/post/179711940200


End file.
